MBooks

This is a simple, temporary interface to a set of indexed MARC records from the University of Michigan's MBooks collection. The purpose of the interface of tri-fold:

It is suppose to demonstrate the feasibility of open data. Download data. Do something with it. This is a lot of what librarianship is about. The profession needs to do this to a greater degree.
It is suppose to allow fellow librarians to see the extent of the data being made available from the MBooks collection.
It demonstrates how a search interface called SRU (Search/Retrieve via URL) functions. Send a query. Get a response as XML. Render the XML using XSLT. "SRU is simple." All you need is a modern browser. These are modern computing skills in information work.

Keep in mind that the interface to this index is simple, rudimentary, if not dumb. You can enter single words, phrases enclosed in quotes, and a few simple fielded searches (title=philosophy). You can apply quite a number of other queries as well, but nobody ever does. Ironically, multiple word queries not surrounded by quotes will fail.

Finally, for technical details, see the blog postings for get-mbooks and MBooks, revisited.

Creator: Eric Lease Morgan <eric...@infomotions.com>
Date created: 2008-09-09
Date updated: 2009-01-19
URL: http://infomotions.com/sandbox/mbooks/